


things i have loved, i'm allowed to keep.

by orphan_account



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Hey La Hey La My Boyfriend’s Back, Hurt/Comfort, Planet Naboo (Star Wars), Post-Canon, Post-Canon Fix-It, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Spoilers, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir AU, Varykino (Star Wars)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-21
Updated: 2020-01-10
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:35:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 15,752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21879709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Lucy Muir: It's no crime to be alive!Captain Gregg: No, my dear, sometimes it's a great inconvenience. The living can be hurt.[Hi there, this is a canonverse AU ofThe Ghost and Mrs. Muir, because I love pain. 🙃]Update from July 2020: If you are just finding this fic, hi hey hello! I do feel I need to include a disclaimer up here in the summary, because I really am not certain if it will ever be finished as I seemed to have run out of inspiration on this one. If you want to read anyway, thank you and I hope you enjoy! If that kind of thing drives you crazy and you'd rather avoid, I completely understand.❤
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 366
Kudos: 352
Collections: TROS Reylo Fix-it Fics





	1. Chapter 1

**39 ABY.**

On the shores of Lake Rilindje, a beautiful shimmering expanse of cobalt and silver situated just north of Theed, the Nabooian capital city, there sits a summer palace.

Once, many centuries ago, it was called Munni, for its domed green towers that rise from the hilly lakeside like graceful sea kelp, strong and study and gleaming. A mad poet roamed its halls in that time, crafting his masterpiece, an epic sonnet recounting the Defense of Naboo. 

Later, much later, it passed into the possession of the family Naberrie. It was called Varykino and served as a reprieve from the rigors of the court and city life for all who passed through its doors, including the late great queen herself, Padmé Amidala.

For a time, after her passing, it was called Pikëllim, and was inhabited solely by mourners. Veiled women in flowing robes of black drifted through its halls, weeping for all that had been lost—their queen and her heirs and the very Republic itself.

Eventually, the mourners moved on, leaving it abandoned.

Then it stood empty. Rumors flourished as heartily as the lush countryside that swallowed its walls and creeped inside; snaking vines and skittering creatures were its only residents.

_Haunted_ , they have said. _Perilous to all who pass through its doors_ , they have said. _In there lies only madness and ruin_ , they have said.

They say it even now.

* * *

“Engines ready?” asks Rey. She does not look up from the shuttle console; her hands grip the yoke with assurance. They have made many runs for the fledgling Galactic Coalition in this shuttle. It is an old UT-60D U-wing support craft, sturdy and reliable as they come. She knows its wings, its retractable strike foils, its body, its armament, its GBk-585 motivators, its navicomputer brain and the spark of unknowable life it holds somewhere deep in its wires. Knows it all like she knows the veins of her gloved hands.

When Rey flies this rusty old bucket of bolts, it is an extension of herself, and therefore an extension of the Force. She makes it sing, she makes it soar. She remembers flying it in simulacrum when she was a young girl, trapped in her AT-AT during day after day of sandstorms, using an old imperial simulator to while away the hours. Back then she might’ve given anything to fly it for real, to leave Jakku’s atmosphere even just for a few moments.

Now there is no elation, only weariness leaching at her bones. They ache more and more as of late, an aftereffect of the events on Exegol. But at least there is not the sensation of a yawning vacuum in her solar plexus, devouring every other emotion until only grief remains.

At least these days, she sometimes smiles. Even laughs. Rose is good for her and she for Rose, in that way.

“We’re good to go,” answers Rose tiredly, dropping into the cockpit’s second seat. “You want to take point on this one, or should I?”

“I’ve got it,” Rey says. “Just watch my six.”

“Don’t I always?” Even as she speaks, Rose is flipping through her ingrained routine of controls checks. “Deflector shield generator, check,” she mutters, as much to herself as to Rey. “Signal jammers, check. Heavy laser cannons, check. Quad laser cannons, check.”

“Concussion missiles and blaster cannons?” Rey rubs an itch on the side of her nose, just barely resisting the urge to lean forward and rest her heavy head on the console.

“Check and check. Navcomp? Motivator?”

“Check,” says Rey.

Rose nods.

There comes the whine of the fusial thrust engines being engaged as Rey pushes on the yoke. A momentary jutter and lurch, pushing the women back in their seats. Then they are away, ripping off into the black depths in a blur of ion blue.

. . .

“I’ve heard stories about Naboo,” Rose begins, some time later, when their course has been charted and there is not much left to do but sit in the cockpit and make themselves sick on the dizzying passing of the cosmos, or retire to the crew lounge and strike up a game of death star bluff.

Rey picks up a card from the pile, then discards two. “You’ve heard stories about everywhere, Rose.”

Rose’s grin is rueful. “But the stories I’ve heard about Naboo are _interesting_.”

“Well let’s have it then.”

“Home of the Gungans, the lake dwellers.”

Not looking up from her hand, Rey gestures, to indicate she already knew this.

“And Padmé Amidala. Mother to Luke and Leia. Grandmother to Kylo Ren.” Rose picks up three cards and discards one. Her dark eyes scan Rey’s face, searching for a semblance of reaction. When Rey merely arches a brow then draws a single card, discarding nothing, Rose continues, “And… Palpatine.”

A tremor passes through her at the name, so fine it might’ve been overlooked if the two women had not been flying missions together, spending virtually all their time together, for nearly three years.

“Don’t,” she growls.

“Still think it’s healthy, just holding it in like that? You’re _shaking_ , Rey.”

It’s a tired argument for them, retread many times.

“You don’t understand,” Rey bites out, but her hands are trembling so badly now that she gives up on the game. Her tossed cards land in a sloppy arc on the table between them.

“Oh, about losing everything you ever had to call your own? Losing your family, your parents, your sister, the war that kept you going, the fight that gave you purpose? About the man you love leaving you? I wouldn’t know anything about _that_ , huh?”

Rose’s tone is jeering, her sweet face contorted in a grimace, but Rey takes no offense. They are both of them wounded creatures, after all; she could no more begrudge Rose her anger than she could herself.

Anger is as good a fuel as any. It is what they have left. They must use it, if they are to keep going.

So she shakes her head and glances off down one of the ship’s dim passageways, towards the aftwards end of the shuttle.

“Think I’ll try to catch a few hours,” she says vaguely, blinking, already rising from the leather booth and drifting away towards the one that leads to the barracks.

From behind her, she hears Rose’s deep sigh. “I’ll wake you when we reach Mid Rim,” comes her response, just as faint, just as vague.

Rey nods without turning. She walks without seeing. She lays herself down in a berth she has arbitrarily claimed as her own, numbly tucking herself into its scratchy woolen bedding, all without thinking.

There in the darkness she lays, for many hours, without sleeping.

. . .

Theed thrums with life in the early morning. They touch down smoothly on the capital city’s spaceport landing pad; it is perched atop the cliff that bisects the city; they are so high up they are almost in the clouds, and are afforded a dizzying view of the royal palace’s domed towers, the verdant city streets, lush with green and budding things, and of course, that cliff over which rushes thunderously frothing waterfalls. 

And beyond the city limits: more green. Rolling green as far as the eye can see, interspersed with glittering plains of deep, deep blue, which Rey knows now to be lakes. And there, at the edges of the land: shadowy mountains, their alpine peaks iced with bright white.

Naboo is a beautiful planet. It is a clear, sunny day, the high sky a brilliant blue, the morning sun golden, the system’s three moons pale slivers in the west. A gentle breeze rushing past her face carries the scent of green, of life. It is a scent she has become accustomed to, but not one she grew up with.

Rey looks over at Rose, who is also studying the landscape; Rose gives her an indifferent half a smile, her eyebrows rising expectantly.

“Better get to it,” is all she musters.

Rey blinks once then nods. Together, they turn towards their cargo.

. . .

Their instructions were clear for once the anti-infantry ground cannons had been delivered to the royal armory: return to base on Batuu, debrief with General Finn, take a few day cycle’s worth of shore leave, and await new mission parameters.

And yet.

Without discussing it, neither Rey nor Rose rush back to the spaceport.

There is something happening in the streets of Theed. A parade, a festival of some sort. A celebration of something ancient and sacred, perhaps. Everyone is dancing, faces painted in pastel swirls of lavender and coral and turquoise, as they proceed down the capital’s leaf-lined avenues. There is cheerful music coming from bands perched on hovering repulsorpods; loud brassy tones and rumbling percussion set a propulsive rhythm to things, while lilting flute and an instrument that somehow replicates the sound of water on stones add a note of whimsy to the tune.

People are eating, they are talking, they are celebrating.

There is laughter.

Rey’s stomach is a cold stone, her feet are leaden anvils. She watches under the shade of a tall leafy tree as the procession rolls on and on, warm colors and warm music and warm smiles. The day is warm. So warm. There is a bead of sweat rolling down her spine. She suppresses a shiver.

Beside her, Rose stands equally still.

“They’re all so…” Rey tries to go on, but her mouth is dry.

“Happy,” whispers Rose.

In a passing old man’s laughter, she hears an echo of a revenant’s fiendish cackle. The sun passes behind a cloud and she shivers in earnest. A tall man with a lumbering gait walks past; the dark, glossy waves of his hair just brush his shoulders.

“Ben,” she gasps, heart lurching.

Not sparing a moment, she clambers over the tree’s roots and onto the cobblestone street, hearing Rose call after her as if from a great distance. But she must reach him. The man walks quickly; too quickly. She picks up her pace, jogging until she is right behind him.

It borders on painful, her awareness of how her own fingertips tingle as she reaches out and presses them to the man’s tunic-clad shoulder. She is nearly vibrating with need, with fervor.

_Ben._

He spins to face her, and something in Rey’s chest cracks in half; something ice-cold pools in her lungs.

The man’s face is pleasant enough, but the features are all wrong. It’s wrong, he is wrong, this is all so wrong, how could it be so wrong? How? How is his face _wrong_ , so different from the one she needs to see? Where is she, where is he, why is this happening?

Where is _he_? Why did he leave her mere minutes after she _finally_ found him? Why?

The man smiles down at her with teeth too straight, a nose too short, a jaw too sharp, lips too thin. “Yes?” he inquires politely.

“No,” Rey coughs out. “No, no, no…”

Rose’s hands are on her then, gently pulling her away, guiding her back through the procession, forging a path through the crowd. She feels herself being seated under the tree. A canteen is lifted to her lips.

She drinks, closing her eyes. When she is finished, she sinks forward to lean on her bent legs and hide her face between her knees. Rose’s palm strokes her back, firm and steady, alternating side to side with up and down. A simple pattern, like a cross. Like a main laid with his arms stretched out on his burial pyre.

Neither says anything for a long time.

. . .

What calls them to that lake, to that deteriorating structure on its banks?

Later, she will know. But on that day, that day of festival and light, she does not.

Rose and Rey wander through the city for a long time after the parade has disappeared around a distant street corner. As they mosey, they catch snippets of its lively music, of its throng of people; they see flashes of color and dancing pass down alleys parallel to their own.

Each time, Rose herds her away from it.

Rey can feel her worry in the Force, like the high-pitched whistling of a tea kettle set aboil.

By midday the heat becomes stifling; they seek shade under the linen canopy of a merchant selling fried yobshrimp and cheap vinegary wine. They eat and drink heartily, eagerly, and when they finish, they ramble on.

Before they know it, they have reached the northern outskirts of the city. Beyond a few factories and stately mansions there sprawls nothing but forest and hill and lake.

“What now?” asks Rose, squinting against the glaring afternoon sunlight.

Rey squints back at her. “I don’t know,” she confesses softly.

In response, Rose purses her lips, her dewy features settling into something like determination. “Let’s go for a swim.”

She ponders it. Why shouldn’t they? They can take their shore leave here just as easily as on Batuu, Rey figures. 

“We should comm Finn,” she says, a pang of guilt lancing her at the thought of their friend worrying for them.

“Should we?” comes Rose’s rapidfire response, brittle and quavering ever-so-slightly.

“I—”

“It can wait,” says Rose, “C’mon. It’s hot out. The water will feel good. Look at that lake out there, on that side of the valley, see that old palace on its northern shore? I’ll race you to it.”

A reluctant smile creeps up on Rey. “Hardly a fair fight—I grew up on a desert planet.”

“And I grew up on a dead rock,” says Rose, already taking off sprinting. Over her shoulder she throws back, “Last one there’s a nerfherder!”

With that, the diminutive mechanic disappears into the thick grasses of the valley lying between them and the lake. A moment later, letting out a whoop, the last of the Jedi follows suit.

. . .

Despite Rose’s slight stature, she’s fit from years of army life and hard labor before that. Rey is willowy and powerful and could use the Force to propel herself through the cold waves if she wanted, but she does not want that. She wants nothing to do with the Force right now. She simply paddles, an ungainly flapping of arms and legs, and steadily falls farther and farther behind Rose, whose movements are more coordinated.

Thus it passes that Rose has had some time to wait on the shore under the old palace’s vine-covered towers by the time Rey stumbles up out of the water, breathless and blue-lipped and dripping on the beach’s soft sand.

She has had time to observe its crumbling stucco facade, its domed, iodized copper rooftops, its shattered windows, its detritus-strewn porticos and verandas, while she basked in the warm sun, letting her underthings dry on her body.

“Some place,” she huffs at Rey, as Rey drops down next to her, settling in to do the same.

“Should we go inside?”

Rose blanches. “It’s kind of... creepy.”

Rey knows creepy. She has seen herself through a mirror darkly, with ravenous eyes and an unhinged jaw and teeth sharper than a rathtar’s. She has peered into the unseeing white eyes of a ghoul, her kin, returned from the dead to consume her. She has felt her very _life_ leave her limbs, stolen from her; has touched the bottomless nothing that waits on the other side of all this.

She has held the love of her life in her arms—her Ben, the other half of the dyad—and she has smiled back at him after they’ve kissed, just that once. Only ever the once. 

And then, lips still ablaze from the touch of his own, she has watched him crumple, lifeless, grey, and slip away into the Force, where she could not follow, leaving behind clothes still warm on the cold cavern floor.

Rey knows of the Dark. She knows evil. She knows creepy. 

This is just an old house.

“Come on,” she urges, pushing herself back into her feet then extending her hand out to Rose. “Let’s take a look.”

Rose takes the offered hand and pulls herself up.

“If we get possessed, you’re the one who has to tell Poe,” she grumbles.

. . .

Drafts tugs at the vines that cover the hallway walls, making their heart-shaped leaves and fragrant blossoms dance. The ceilings are high, the rooms and halls wide, with windows strategically placed to make the atmosphere airy and almost ethereal. Yet there is otherwise a certain mustiness to the place, no doubt a result of mold or mildew, especially in those rooms facing the lake and the rooms whose walls are draped in fading tapestries. 

And the windows are mostly shattered, of course. Shards of glass litter the leaf-carpeted floors. The rooms are full of furniture that must have once been very fine; now it is shabby, shredded by claws and discolored by the elements. Animal droppings and a winsome chorus of birdsong are the only signs of sentient life; otherwise, there is an unsettling stillness to the rooms they pass.

“Still not creepy?” jokes Rose, though not as steadily as perhaps she’d hoped. She persists anyway in following Rey down endless halls, through parlors and dining rooms and ballrooms and libraries, bedrooms and ‘freshers, up grand staircases and down secret back-of-the-house stairwells.

She recognizes the burnished black marble and creamy larmalstone and rosy maleristone that comprise the once-grand interior: expensive and lustrous building materials, mined from planets that were no doubt stripped to the core for rock just such as these.

Oh, yes. This was once a _very_ grand place.

Rose does not spit at the sight of so much excess, but the urge to do so is beyond tempting.

She has gotten no answer, she notices. Her friend and co-pilot and partner has gone into one of her odd, serene trances. Rey’s mouth is slightly open, as though she is tasting the air. Her head swivels in all directions. Her wide green eyes seem to miss nothing, take in everything.

Taking in things Rose could never understand, no doubt. There is bitterness in the thought. _Everyone talks about the Force uniting us_ , she thinks. _Binding us. But it is a wall between us, me and you. Between those with the Force and those without._

She watches the Jedi as she bends to run a fingertip down the bell-shaped petal of a weed that has grown up through a chink in the obsidan-flecked mosaic.

“So much pain,” murmurs Rey. Anguish deepens her voice to a guttural rumble.

_But maybe_ , Rose thinks, _it’s better that way._

. . .

They set up camp on a sweeping balcony off of one of the upper-story dining rooms, overlooking the lake. As the sun drops below the trees, so does the temperature dip; they build a fire from dining room chair legs, then comm Finn to fill him in on the successful cannon drop-off and let him know they’ll be taking leave where they are. When Rey informs him they’ll stay the week without asking Rose her opinion, Rose opens her mouth to argue, then shuts it, finding that she agrees with the decision.

Underneath the desolation of this place, underneath the grandeur, there is an air of profound loneliness and almost… yearning. It calls to her.

“It calls to me too,” says Rey over caf the next morning, apropos of nothing.

“Still hate it when you do that,” Rose grouses.

“Sorry.” The smile Rey shoots her is earnest, but strained. “The loneliness, though. Stillness. Like a sad kind of peace.”

Rose stares over the balustrade at the lake, so calm at this hour that its surface is a shining silver pane over which wafts gentle whirls of fog.

“Where shall we explore today?”

For a moment, Rose contemplates, tapping out a rhythm against the side of her mug; she recognizes it with a start. It is the one from the parade.

“The garage,” she says at last. “Definitely the garage.”

. . .

In her dreams now, Rey is always small. Her arms are still soft with baby fat, not ropy from years of climbing. Her face is round, her hands weak. She is small, and she is crawling inside the hatch of an AT-AT, the winds of X'us'R'iia whipping around her stubby little legs. Tears run hot down her cheeks. The tang of salt stings her tongue when she licks her lips.

She is alone. She is small and she is afraid and she is alone. It is always thus.

Into the AT-AT, she tries to crawl. The space between the desert world outside and the rusted-out home within stretches on and on. That space grows narrower, closing in on her. An endless tunnel extends before her, ever tighter, until she can barely squeeze through, until hot metal is crushing her, sand filling her mouth, she is drowning in it, it is so very dark now, the sand, everywhere—

Then she wakes. Dawn has come, and she has survived another night, another death. 

It is always thus.

There are variations. Sometimes she dies on Crait in a brilliant crash, all billowing plumes of fire and clouds of crimson salt. Sometimes Snoke snaps her neck, because _he_ is not there. Sometimes the Praetorian guard do it. Sometimes she falls and breaks her leg and withers away in the belly of an old imperial Star Destroyer. Sometimes she accepts Palpatine’s ultimatum, and he pours the rancid ichor of his soul into hers, and she is never again Rey.

She is something else.

In those dreams, she is as good as dead anyway.

But on the first night they camp out in their regulation durashelter tents on the balcony of the old abandoned summer palace, Rey does not dream.

Waking to find the night has passed with only the soft darkness of deep sleep is a gift of mercy greater than any Rey has ever known.

. . .

Of course they are drawn to the jumpspeeders. How could they not be? They are women who love to move, and _fast_. And despite however long the house has moldering away, the garage has been locked and sealed hermetically all the while, so the rows upon rows of transports are in relatively pristine condition. They glitter and shine under the garage’s hanging glowlamps.

Rey picks the shiniest, fastest one. It is a 88-R Nightscreamer, a limited edition make and model, very expensive, very fast, so fast it is equipped with forward deflector shields to protect its riders. “Know your way around this?”

Rose tilts her head mockingly, sending a reproachful look in Rey’s direction.

“Alright, alright,” Rey laughs, “Take us into town. We’d better get some supplies if we’re to stay the week.”

. . .

“You’re staying _where?_ ” barks the elderly fruit merchant, her blue eyes nearly bulging out of her face.

Rey and Rose exchange a wary look. In a cautious tone, Rose repeats her brief explanation of how they found the place; the woman had asked, conversationally, where they were staying while she added the price of the fruit they’d chosen from her stall. Looking to sell them a room at an inn, no doubt. She’d probably known from a glance that they were not Nabooian.

“No.” The woman shakes her head. “No, you really mustn’t.”

“And why not?” Rose demands.

“You must _not_ go back there,” the woman says.

“Does it belong to—” begins Rey, but the woman cuts across her:

“You cannot stay there!”

Her voice has risen to a shrill squawk; it draws the attention of other shoppers at the marketplace. Rose is quick to snatch the bag of fruit from her hand and shove one full of credit ingots in its stead. Still the woman shrieks, “You must _not_!”

“Please,” says Rey, hands raised in surrender, “Please, we didn’t know it was occupied. It looks abandoned.”

“It is,” hisses the woman, eyes so wide Rey can see the white all the way around her irises, “It is! Except…”

“Except?” prompts Rose.

But the woman’s eyes never leave Rey’s. Lips quivering, she whispers, “For the ghosts.”

. . .

Standing shoulder to shoulder, Rose and Rey study the palace from the spit of lakeside sand, once they’ve returned the speeder to the garage and cajoled a conservator back to functionality, then stored their groceries inside.

Rose lets out a heavy breath. “You really think—”

“I didn’t dream last night.” Rey blinks back her tears. “For the first time in _four_ years, I did not die a terrible death in my dreams. Why?”

“You were really, _really_ tired?” quips Rose, in a small voice.

“Rose.”

“I know.”

Rey feels a small hand slip into hers, clasping it.

“I know,” repeats Rose, more subdued.

_She really does._

Rey swallows around the thing in her throat, the thing that comes to choke her whenever she thinks of that eternal night on Exegol, of the livid purple-white lightning, of that faceless, grunting arena of Sith, of that ghoul, his eyes, milky white turned tawny once he’d taken from her everything he believed she had… and he _had_ , hadn’t he? Hadn’t he ripped out one half of her soul, hadn’t he— 

“Rey.”

Rose is staring up at Rey’s hairline, lips pressed in a hard line.

“Sorry,” she mumbles.

“No—”

“I’ve tried—so hard—to—to be—” sputters Rey, but Rose… Rose is not staring at Rey’s forehead, she’s staring past it, pointing now, up at one of the cylindrical towers to their left.

“ _No_ ,” she says, insistently, “Look!”

Like a cloud cutting off sunlight unexpectedly in the high heat of a summer day, the chill that passes through her is enough to make her flesh pimple, her stomach somersault. Yet she forces herself to turn, tilt her head back, and follow the trajectory of Rose’s pointing.

And there, inside the frame of one of the tower's many broken windows, _nearly_ hidden by the shadows of the room within—but not quite—is a face she knows.

The _right_ face. The right nose, the right jaw, the right brow, the right eyes, dark and inscrutable, staring down at her. A face she has yearned for, a face that fate or the Force or some other cruel entity has denied her in her dreams, in waking life. A face belonging to a man she still loves.

The face of Ben Solo.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I didn't think I would write any more Reylo fic, to be 100% honest. I kind of felt like, with my last fic, I had said everything that I wanted to say.
> 
> Then I saw _The Rise of Skywalker_. Now it would seem I have no end to the things I'd like to say. So here we are.
> 
> Normally I like to include endnotes because I have about 15 trillion tabs open at this moment and it would be nice to share all those links with you. But I wrote this in a day, it is un-beta'd, and I am very tired.
> 
> Is it any good? I don't know. But it's my attempt to do a little "saving what we love," just like the good Rose Tico told us to.


	2. Chapter 2

Up, up she runs. Up the beach, cutting through one of the downstairs kitchens, up a servant stairwell, up a grand staircase in the east wing, up four more corridors, skidding as she careens around each corner, Rose right on her heels, up a spiral staircase leading to _that_ tower, fast, fast as she can… 

Only to find that the room, a round observatory with a domed ceiling, is empty, save for the desiccated leaves adorning the floor, its empty window frames, and in its center, a magnificent telescope that looks old enough to be from the age before the electrotelescope. Its golden pieces are dull in the observatory’s low light; Rey’s fingers itch to polish it, to return it to its former glory.

This is all she finds.

No one is at the window, there is no sign that anyone ever _has_ been. There are only a few stubborn shards of glass clinging to the stone.

“He was _here_ ,” she says, panting, then turns to Rose, who is equally winded, doubled over with her hands on her knees. “I saw him! You saw him, too!”

Rose shakes her head at Rey, then drops it back down, letting it hang. “I… I thought I did.”

“No, you _did_ ,” Rey insists. “You pointed him out to me. _You_ saw him first.”

“It—it could’ve been a trick of the light. What would Kylo Ren be doing up this room, four years after he died on Exegol?”

Rey blows an angry breath out her nose, fighting, as she always does, to not correct the given name of the late Supreme Leader. She passes over to the window, running her finger along the glass’s sharp edge.

“You never talk about him,” says Rose. She appears at Rey’s side, one window over, peering down to the beach where they were standing only a minute ago. “But sometimes I think…”

“Think what?” barks Rey. Too sharp, too loud. She winces at the acid in her own voice. She hadn’t meant for it to be there.

“That you want to.” Rose lifts her chin, defiance in her eyes. “And I want you to know that you can.”

“Why?”

Rose’s brows furrow. “Why what?”

“Why can I talk about him to you? What’s he to you?” Rey snorts. “Just the Supreme Leader of the First Order. A monster.”

But she can see that this time, this tried and true demurral will not stand with her co-pilot, with her _friend_. Softly, almost under her breath, Rose says, “Yeah. But what else was he to _you_?”

“I—”

“I’m not saying you _have_ to tell me, Rey. I’m just saying… you can. I’ll listen.”

Rey blows out another breath, but it’s calmer this time.

“Thanks, Rose,” she murmurs, feeling defeated. Unsteady. More lost than ever. “Maybe someday.”

. . .

The strangeness takes no time at all to begin, after that.

Though the day is beautiful, the sky clear and the air fresh, warm, Rey and Rose end up back in the garage, ogling at the sheer number of transports and toys. It’s not long before they are elbow-deep in the guts of a J-type 327 Nubian Royal Starship, a sleek, elegant craft with a hull fashioned from such gloriously flawless chromium that they can see their tired faces with perfect clarity in its smooth surface.

But… 

“Hey Rose, have you seen my sub-loop spanner?” Rey calls out from the cockpit, a few hours on.

“What?” Rose shouts back, from the ventral engine room, half the ship’s length away.

With an irritated sigh, Rey rises from under the console and passes down the stately, pale pink bodywood-paneled corridor towards the hatch that leads down to the engines. She sees Rose on her back, face smudged with an iridescent blue fluid.

“My sub-loop spanner,” she repeats, watching as Rose’s features crinkle with confusion. “Did you borrow it?”

“Why would I? Mine’s right here.” Rose lifts the aforementioned tool off the grated metal floor and waves it at Rey.

“R-right.” Rey shakes her head. “I—sorry.”

“Did you check the garage? Maybe by that T-85 you were drooling over earlier?”

“Maybe… I’ll go have a look,” she sighs, and turns to leave Rose to it.

But the sub-loop spanner is not there, nor is it anywhere else she looks, nor is it in the cockpit, when she finally gives up and decides to search there one more time. She ends up borrowing Rose’s for the remainder of the afternoon.

“I know for a _fact_ I had it with me in the cockpit,” she insists, over noodles and fried cambylictus seeds that evening.

She and Rose are back on their balcony, seated cross-legged on the low stone balustrade, watching the blazing sun as it sets over the trees. It sets the lake afire, the waves making flecks of reflected magenta and tangerine shudder and dance.

Rose shrugs. “It’s been a long day. You’re probably tired.”

“Not _that_ tired, Rose.”

“It’s just a sub-loop spanner.”

“Yes, but it was mine!” she grits out, vexation rising within her. “I’m usually much more…”

“Careful about your things,” supplies Rose, with a knowing nod. They are children of deprivation, the both of them. Rey knows Rose understands.

Rey pulls in a deep breath, then blows it out slowly. “Yes,” she says, at last. In anger, she spears a seed, swirls it up inside a tangle of sauce-bathed noodles, and shoves the entire thing in her mouth.

“It’ll turn up.” Rose’s smile is tired, distracted, but her dark eyes are warm, her expression thoughtful. “I’m sure it will.”

“I hope so,” is all Rey can muster.

. . .

That night, as she is drifting off to sleep, she feels a sharp pain in her back. When she lifts her sleeping roll up off the thin durashelter floor, she finds the sub-loop spanner lying there beneath it.

. . .

On their third day at the palace, Rey and Rose decide to have a picnic on the beach. 

In one of the empty old bedrooms, they open a set of doors to discover a massive interior closet; within it, they find an entire wardrobe’s worth of a woman's lightweight summer garments that are only slightly worse for the wear from their years of disuse. Gossamer flowing summer gowns and caftans line an entire wall of the high-ceilinged inner room. Though they are too short on Rey, she chooses a forest green poncho which she supposes might have been meant to drag upon the ground. It reaches only to her ankles. With ease, Rose picks a nightbloomer-red robe that belts at the waist and fits her like a dream.

“Y’know, I think we look good enough to be invited to dine at the table of Queen Sosha herself,” observes Rose, as they stand together in front of the closet’s claw-footed mirror.

Rey grins in agreement.

They gather emerald wine and five-blossom bread and chalky blue bantha cheese for refreshments. Then, laughing to themselves at their own frivolity, at how silly and light-hearted this entire endeavor has become, they wander barefoot down to the sand.

After unfurling a large woven carpet and depositing themselves upon it, they fill their goblets to the brim. Slowly, they relax into the languor of the still afternoon.

“Paige loved telling jokes,” says Rose after a while, apropos of nothing.

Rey hums; her eyes are shut. The sun is warm, the sand beneath them warm, too. There is an endless chorus of life on this planet, the susurrus of the leaves in the wind twining with the gentle lapping of the lake waves on the sand; and in the distance, a bird chirrups lackadaisically, some rodent answers with a nervous chattering cry.

Life, warm flowing life. She remembers Luke’s lesson, back on Ahch-To, and cautiously, she opens herself to the Force. Just a little bit. Just enough to let some of that life, that energy, flow through her. And then she is warm, too.

The ever-present cold eases, for a moment.

“It was sort of strange, but in a good way. At least I always thought so. She was a very serious person. Practically raised me, after our parents—” Rose swallows, not bothering to go on. Rey knows how it ends, anyway. There’s no need for her to speak the painful word aloud. “Anyway, that’s how she used to cheer me up when I was overwhelmed or sad or tired. She took on so much, from such a young age—she was younger than we are when it happened—and maybe she found strength in being serious all the time, I don’t know. She just always was, far back as I can remember. Except when I needed her not to be. She was so… so…”

“Good,” Rey offers, softly.

“Very.”

Rose’s voice cracks on the word.

Now it is Rey who must swallow; she opens her eyes and sees a miasma of pain, like a noxious cloud of nervetoxin, a sickly chartreuse shade, hovering around Rose, haunting her. Her friend’s cheeks are damp.

“Tell me a joke?”

Rose coughs out a dry laugh through her tears. “Okay. Why is Yoda such a good gardener?”

After a moment of contemplation, Rey concedes, “I don’t know. Why?”

“Because he has a green thumb.”

“That seems daft—he’s hardly the only one in the galaxy with green-tinted flesh.”

Rose rolls her eyes. “Luke Skywalker walks into a cantina on Mos Eisley, cradling a slab of dirt in his arms.”

“Why would be do that? Where would he even find a slab of solid dirt on a planet covered in sand?”

“He just does somehow. With the Force or whatever.”

Rey frowns. “That’s not how the Force—“

“ _Anyway_ ,” interrupts Rose, “The barman asks, ‘What’ll it be?’”

“Mm…”

“So Luke says, ‘A pint for me, and one for the road!’”

“Jedi really aren’t supposed to drink,” Rey points out.

Rose shoots a meaningful glance at Rey’s half-empty goblet of wine, then smirks.

“Well why would he order a drink for a clod of dirt, anyway?” she blusters.

“You’re not much a joke person, are you?” Rose sends back.

“Well not when they make no sense!”

“Okay then.” Rose props herself up on her elbows, sloshing some wine over the brim of her goblet in the process. “Whoops!” she giggles, and dabs at it with her fingers, then raises them to her lips. “Let’s hear _your_ idea of a good joke.”

“Hmm…”

“Unless you don’t know any and are just needlessly criticizing mine because there’s something _else_ bothering you?”

Rose squints at her, one brow quirked.

On an irritated huff, Rey blurts out, “Why did Anakin Skywalker cross the hyperlane?”

“Oh please, everyone knows that one—to get to the Dark Side,” Rose says, laughing.

Rey opens her mouth to reply, but before she can— 

_‘Clang!’_

They both freeze; Rose’s laughter dies on her lips. Her smile fades, replaced with an uneasy frown. 

“What was that?”

“The… the wind catching a door,” tries Rey.

_‘Clang! Clang!’_

“I—”

_‘BOOM.’_

“What in the Core is going _on_ in there?” shouts Rose, staring up the beach at the old palace. 

Rey is already on her feet, thoughts sluggish and legs clumsy from the wine. She stumbles towards one of the many lakeside doorways, hearing Rose staggering over the sand behind her with only a light chorus of cursing.

“Hello?” she calls, from inside the foyer. A glance up the sprawling staircase reveals nothing; the tapestries of the room all hang still, the furniture undisturbed.

“Hello!” Rose’s shout is more audibly panicked than hers, but it reflects Rey’s disquiet.

_‘BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!’_

The sound comes from upstairs, so with nothing more than a shared look, Rey and Rose rush towards its origin. They stumble up the stairs, around a few corners, and down another set of steps, before they tumble over the threshold of what appears to be an empty room. The marble floor is inlaid with other stone to create a wheel-like pattern that accentuates the room circular shape, its rounded walls; tall, velvet-curtained windows rise into rounded peaks and allow the high afternoon sunlight to spill across the patterned floor.

Otherwise, it is without a single piece of furniture.

“Okay, I’m back to thinking this place is creepy,” Rose mutters.

Rey scrunches her nose. This room was definitely the source of the booming; she knows from years of hyper-awareness while out scavenging, and she knows because she can _sense_ it.

There is something here.

She passes to the windows and glances out each of them.

The pastoral world outside remains undisturbed, but she is not deterred. She does another visual sweep of the room at the same time Rose does, meeting her friend’s gaze when she’s done. Nothing. Rose shakes her head. Slowly, almost hesitantly, both women raise their eyes.

There, affixed to the soaring domed ceiling, is a dining table and chairs, a sideboard, a half a dozen pewter braziers, and three massive vases.

All of the furniture in the room is on the ceiling, and Rey cannot understand how. Or why.

“Is it… adhesive?” wonders Rose.

“Maybe.”

“But then, what were we just hearing? I—how—”

Again, Rey shakes her head without tearing her eyes away from the bizarre sight. The furniture is arranged exactly as it might’ve been on the floor, almost as though it is a mirrored reflection. It is… unsettling. And yet.

An errant giggle escapes her.

“Oh no,” moans Rose, “Please don’t tell me you’re losing it _now_.”

Another giggle, and then a high-pitched peal of hysterical cackling.

“Rey.”

She claps her hand over her mouth, but it cannot be helped. How absurd this all is. What is going on in this place? Who or what is doing this?

Could it be… 

But she cannot even let herself think it, lest she begin to hope.

It’s still nonsensical though, and staggering back, she laughs deep and low, from her belly, until it begins to ache, until she bends in half and holds a side where a stitch forms. Eventually, she hears Rose crack and join in.

She does not know for how long they laugh. Until tears run down their faces, until they are holding each other up, until they have collapsed onto the hard stone floor. At least that long. When they finally collect themselves and, for lack of any constructive solution to the odd problem—and even there they are uncertain if it _is_ a threat or a problem or merely some quirk of Nabooian gravitational laws—the women give up, and wander back down to the beach. And all the while, Rey feels a lightness in her step and a pleasant kind of contentedness that has been missing for many years.

How good it is, to laugh.

. . . 

The next morning, their fourth day in the palace, Rey wakes to the now-familiar sound of birdsong and lake waves and the breeze playing with the leaves. She unzips the flap of her durashelter and tumbles out, only to find she is no longer out on her and Rose’s balcony, but up in the observatory with the telescope.

She has no memory of moving the tent, nor does she remember being jostled in the night.

Though she is confused beyond all measure, she is otherwise unharmed.

. . .

“You said yourself you haven’t been dreaming,” says Rose, when they come in from a swim that afternoon. She climbs the carpeted staircase ahead of Rey, but Rey can imagine the resolute look on her face all the same.

“And?” she prompts.

Rose shoots her a wary glance over her shoulder. Her dark hair drips onto her simple regulation undershirt. “You’ve been sleeping deeply. Really deeply. When I’m up before you, not even the smell of caf or the sound of me moving around wakes you.”

Rey blinks. She hadn’t realized that. They pass through their dining room together, towards the balcony where their things are situated.

Rose shrugs. “So… sleepwalking?”

“I’ve no memory of it,” she counters, softly, unsure.

“Yeah, that’s how sleepwalking usually—”

Rose gasps and comes to an abrupt halt in front of her, hovering on the threshold leading out onto the sweeping stone terrace; Rey, unawares, walks directly into Rose’s back.

“Oof,” she grunts.

“This isn’t good,” says Rose, breathless, peering around the balcony.

Rey looks from over her shoulder; it takes a moment for what she’s seeing to register, for her to comprehend.

“Shit,” she hisses.

All of their belongings have vanished. The balcony remains littered with leaves and in the center of where they’d set up, the ashes of last night’s bonfire are still there, encircled by the stones they pulled from the shoreline, but otherwise the expanse of balcony is empty all the way to the balustrade.

Their comms, their shelters, their arms, their supplies, the conservator, all of it. Gone.

“Shit is right,” Rose grumbles.

. . .

“Is it _him_ doing this? Kylo Ren?” Rose posits aloud, after they’ve chosen a comfortable sitting room as their new quarters. The chamber is small, located at the pinnacle of another of the palace’s towers, but it has windows that rise from floor to ceiling and somehow, _their_ glass has not been shattered; there is also a hearth into which they pile more chair legs, warming the room and themselves as the sun begins to set. Its furniture is well-worn but comfortable: a few large couches will serve for sleeping, a carpet faded with the tread of some phantom pacing soul, some dark wooden end tables. It will suffice.

They are hungry, but there is little to help that now, not unless they want to ride to Theed in the fading twilight and then back from Theed in the dark. Neither woman has even suggested it.

_Perhaps there are artificial foodstuffs in the kitchen stores_ , ponders Rose, watching Rey as she paces before the hearth, in exactly the same path worn into the carpet. _They wouldn’t have turned, might be edible. Worth a look._

The Jedi is turned slightly away from Rose, who has settled herself on one of the couches, but in the silvering mirror set into the wooden mantle over the fire, Rose can see the scowl on her friend’s face, even in the shadows.

Rey halts, staring at her own reflection. Her voice is strained, when she finally answers. “Does Kylo Ren strike you as the type to whimsically haunt a couple of trespassers for fun?”

“Does this really strike you as whimsical?”

“It’s not _entirely_ threatening,” Rey says. “Just… strange.”

“Um, whoever it is, they stole our stuff. I’d count that as at least a little threatening. And… I don’t really have any better answers,” Rose tells her, squinting to catch a glimpse of her reaction. But Rey has resumed her pacing; in truth, Rose is tempted to join her. She feels just as restless, just as perturbed.

A bead of silence stretches out into a chain, unbroken, ironclad, forging itself into something solemn. Rose loses herself in contemplation of what Finn might say about all of this and then the immediate knee jerk self-derision that comes with such thoughts of the man. _Blast it, Rose,_ she scolds herself.

“Ben.”

Rose startles, then tilts her head at Rey, awaiting an explanation. Rey does not look back at her. She leans on the mantle, staring down into the fire. Her three buns and the profile of her pert nose, high brow, downturned mouth—all are silhouetted in black, licked tawny-orange at their edges by the flames.

“Ben Solo,” she says.

“That was…”

“Yes.” It is more croak than speech, which Rose understands well enough.

“What haven’t you told me about him, Rey?”

“What I haven’t told you about Ben Solo could fill every room of this palace and spill out onto the grounds,” she says, voice breaking, “It could fill that lake, and all the other lakes on Naboo. It’s… it’s too mu—ch…”

“We can’t just—”

“What?” interrupts Rey, sharply. “Can’t _what_?”

“We can’t shut ourselves off from it, okay?” snaps Rose. “I’ll go first.” She rises from the couch and joins Rey in front of the hearth, leaning against the mantle, waiting until Rey meets her gaze. “I tried to help Finn understand the war, _really_ understand what was at stake, tried to save him from himself and the soldier he’d been raised to be. And what good did it do me? I got a _‘thanks, pal!’_ , a slap on the shoulder, a meaingingless promotion, and four years worth of missions to any sector as far as possible from wherever he was. And as much as I’m happy for him and Poe—”

“You’re hurt,” Rey supplies, her expression softening. _Of course she already knows all of this_ , thinks Rose. _Stupid Jedi skills._

“Yeah, well, things are… things are awkward now,” she huffs, turning to stare into the dancing flames. “I just… thought he was special.”

“He is,” Rey says, but the words are not spoken unkindly. She is trying to be gentle. Rose can tell; Rose can always tell, because while Rey _can_ be gentle, she thinks maybe gentleness is not in the Jedi's essential nature, and it is always a bit jarring when she attempts it.

Rose sighs. “Yeah, he is. But he doesn’t see me the same, does he?”

“I—”

“No bantha shit,” Rose warns her.

Rey dips her head in acquiescence. “He doesn’t love you like you love him.”

“I know!” she bursts out, “I’ve known for years. So why can’t I…”

“I _am_ sorry, Rose.”

She makes a sound Paige would’ve scolded her for, half-laugh, half-grunt. “Not as sorry as I am.”

“You don’t have to stay, you know.”

“In this haunted house? Wasn’t planning on it.”

Rey shakes her head. “In the Coalition’s peacekeeping unit. Working under Finn. Seeing him all the time, reporting to him.”

“Where would I go?” Rose warbles, a great tide of sorrow rising up to drown her. “What _else_ do I have?”

“A galaxy’s worth of options,” Rey says, so earnestly Rose can almost believe it. “And… well…”

She gestures at the sitting room.

“No,” laughs Rose, “You can’t be serious.”

“Why not?” Rey’s expression takes on that stubborn bent Rose dreads above all other Rey expressions; it’s the one that says Rey might be just introducing an idea now, but she’s long since made up her mind about it.

“So I can be a third wheel to you and your ghost?”

“No. So you can help me fix this place up. Make a home for ourselves.”

“It’s not _our_ home, Rey. It’s already occupied, and I’m pretty sure—”

“Have you considered that you’re not the only one who feels she doesn’t belong with the Coalition?” Rey bites out, “Who would leave, if maybe she felt she had another—”

In hindsight, neither woman understands exactly what happened. Rose will swear she saw a bird fly into the mirror; Rey will insist there was no bird, that the aging glass simply shattered of its own accord.

In either case, there is a riotous crack in mirror, right between where the two women are reflected. It grows, encompassing the entirety of the surface. For an instant, silence falls thick upon the room, save for the crackling of the fire and from somewhere outside, a bullfrog’s deep croaking.

Then the glass comes tinkling down in a rush, all of it spilling out over the dark wooden mantle and down onto the carpet.

Both women jump back, alarmed. Rey’s face blanches whiter than larmalstone.

“You alright?” she asks Rose. “Any cuts?”

Rose checks her arms, then her chest and face. “Fine, you?”

Rey makes a sound in the back of her throat that passes for an affirmative.

“So, what was that about staying here and making a home for ourselves?” Rose asks.

She regrets the question as soon as she’s spoken the words; a wounded, haunted look passes across Rey's face, before her eyes shutter and she turns away. The Jedi glances at the wooden paneling now exposed by the broken mirror, then back to Rose, then down to the fire. Then, without another word, she turns and stomps from the room.

. . .

It is not over Rose’s jibe that Rey fumes as she marches through the halls and out into the cold night, nor is it over the broken mirror. She cannot fully understand why she is so angry.

Something about home, about family… How foolish she feels, every time she lets herself hope… 

Rey swallows down those thoughts, pushes her anger aside, and approaches the edge of the mirror-smooth lake.

She’d caught a glance of Rose and herself, right before the crack had appeared. They’d both look so angry. Bitter. Broken. Broken like the mirror is, now.

The emotion rushes out like a leakseaker balloon losing air; she is left feeling deflated, tired. She sits down by the water and stares at her moonlit reflection, only occasionally disturbed by a tiny ripple in the lake’s surface. The night is cold enough that she can see her breath rising up in white gossamer clouds, yet she does not retreat back inside to the warmth of the fireside.

Right now, the cold is welcome; it matches how she has felt inside for four years. Cold, and hollow, and bereft.

This cannot go on forever, can it?

Will there be no rest, no peace, no home for her? Will she and Rose fly missions for the Galactic Coalition all the rest of their days, both of them growing sadder and more embittered and more cemented in their parallel loneliness?

Where is Luke now, where is Leia?

“I thought you loved me,” she whispers, addressing the dead, but unsure precisely which of them she is speaking to. “Is this the path of the Force? This is what you wanted for me?”

Rey’s vision swims with so many tears that she nearly misses it: in the lake, over the right shoulder of her reflection, a pale face appears, pale as her own, framed by wild black waves, dark eyes beseeching and tender. Glowing, tinted slightly blue. A large hand lands on her reflection’s shoulder, the thumb rubbing reassuring strokes into that sensitive space between clavicle and muscle.

She can almost feel its warmth on her own shoulder.

For a moment, she stares, awestruck, tongue-tied. It’s him. The same tunic… his hair wild… lip still bloodied, the scar she gave him healed… that look… so much love… 

_“Ben?”_ she wants to scream, but manages to bite her tongue. She must not scare away this apparition of the Force. It is the first of his she has seen since his death, besides that phantom in the window. It must stay.

He _must_ stay this time.

He crouches down, and his face is there, sure as her own, right beside hers, as though he is embracing her. A solid arm wraps around her reflection’s chest. She is being hugged. She is being _held_.

“Ben,” she sobs, the tears coming faster now. Hotter. Burning her.

The temptation is too strong: she spins on the balls of her feet, searching the grounds of the palace wildly.

But there is no one.

Nothing but the ghostly shapes of grass and trees and verandas and porticos, all silvery and shadowed and lonesome.

With an anguished cry, she turns back to the water, but a strong breeze has sent a ripple across it, and there is naught to be seen but her own stricken, tear-streaked face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to everyone read the first chap and commented or retweeted or reached out, in any fashion, however feels right to you. I am so, so, _so_ glad you are all coming along with me on what will hopefully be a story of healing and love [and some angst because I am who I am, and I'm working with what canon gave us]. I know I haven't responded much on here but please know that your words of encouragement and kindness mean the world to me. Again, this thing is unbeta'd and although I have a rough outline it's also sort of a stream-of-consciousness purging of my sadness for our heroes, so I hope you can overlook or forgive any mistakes. [Please feel free to let me know by DM if you catch something egregious, though!] Otherwise, I hope you are enjoying this. I hope it is helping you to read it as much as it is helping me to write it. Happy days will come again, my friends. 💞
> 
> P.S. I shamelessly stole the 'Paige loving dumb jokes' thing from another fic I wrote, so if you happened to have read Dead Heroes and recognized it that is why 😂 #noregrets


	3. Chapter 3

In dreams, Rose often finds herself back on Hays Minor, that dead cold rock that she called home for the early years of her life. There is a moment, a fleeting memory from childhood, and her mind takes her there again and again.

How strangely inconsequential it seemed at the time. A dull afternoon, their parents off laboring in the mines, she and Paige not yet old enough to join them—though they would be soon, sooner than they should have been—so they are in their shanty of a home, huddled up by the radiant heater, spinning tales to pass the time.

Paige is telling her the legend of Luke Skywalker. Rose is so small, chubby fingers and cheeks, wide-eyed, adoring.

“And that,” Paige concludes, “is how Luke Skywalker slayed the evil Darth Vader, and saved the Republic.”

“Are we in the Republic?” asks young Rose.

Paige shrugs. “Something like that.”

Rose, adult Rose, tired Rose, grieving Rose, hovers by the doorway. She’s tried to forget the dimensions of this home, the windowless building she grew up in, because it depresses her; it is merely one room, serving as living room, kitchen, and bedroom. She knows that if she were to step outside, she would see the communal ‘freshers down the road, in the heart of the tiny mining community. She knows that if she were to pass around to the back, she would find her and Paige’s sad attempts to grow a garden. She knows it too well; she wishes she could forget.

But now she cannot look away from this memory. From her sister.

On the brink of adolescence, or maybe already there. Thirteen, fourteen maybe. She speaks like an adult, like she has seen too much for her years; she sits in front of the glowing heater with a straight back, her chin held high.

“What happened after? To Luke Skywalker?” lisps Rose, eyes growing ever wider. Needing a happy ending, always searching for hope, even then.

Her sister shakes her head. “Nothing happened, ‘cause it’s just a story.”

“He wasn’t real?”

The sigh that escapes Paige carries a weariness that breaks adult Rose’s heart. With a heavy swallow, she crosses the room; unable to resist the urge to offer comfort to this shadow of her sister, she lays a hand on her shoulder.

To her surprise, Paige looks up.

“He _was_ real, wasn’t he?” Paige asks _her_ , asks the real Rose. It is surreal to have her older sister look to her for answers in a way she never did during life. But this is not life; this is dream. This is the space between life and death.

Rose swallows. “I think he was. I… I saw him. At the Battle of Crait.”

“Was he truly everything they said he was?” asks her sister.

“He… he was.”

“A hero,” says Paige, looking satisfied.

She shakes her head, unable to speak.

“I knew it.” Paige smiles; it is brilliant, radiant. She smiled so rarely in life, at this age. They were always so tired, so scared, so hungry.

“I re-member… this day,” Rose sputters. “I asked you if Luke Skywalker was real and you asked me if I wanted him to be. I said yes.”

“And so I told you that he was,” supplies Paige, still smiling. Her voice has deepened to that of her adult self, and somewhere between the space of one blink and the next, she becomes the Paige she was when she hugged Rose goodbye before she flew off in her bomber ship for what would be her final run.

“You were…”

“I was what you needed me to be.”

Rose nods, overcome, lips trembling. “You were the best, Paige.”

Paige bows her head teasingly. “‘Preciate you saying so.”

“Don’t… don’t joke,” she sobs.

“Why not? If we give up on laughter, what’s left?” Paige reaches out and grabs a handful of her trousers. “Your laughter kept me going, Rosie. When things were bad, I would tell you dumb jokes, and you would giggle up at me, and I knew I could keep going. Rose, you haven’t given up, have you?”

She shudders, trying to fight back her tears.

“Don’t you dare give up,” growls her sister. “That’s not you. That’s not us. We're Ticos. We _don't_ give up.”

“I… I can’t…”

“Hey, how’s this? Here’s one more for the road.” Paige’s expression turns resolute. “One more for the road, okay? Listen, Rose.”

“Paige,” she says, sinking to her knees. She clutches at her sister desperately, and weeps in earnest when she feels Paige hug her back, just as tight. “Please don’t go.”

“I have to, Rosie. But you’ll be okay. We'll meet again, someday. Now listen. Are you listening?”

She nods into Paige’s shoulder.

“How do you unlock doors on Kashyyyk?” asks Paige.

“I don’t want you to leave.”

“You’ll see me again. Promise, Rosie. Now… _How_ do you unlock doors on Kashyyyk?”

“I don’t know!” she wails.

Paige grabs her shoulders and pushes her back so she can look at Rose; her cheeks are dry, her smile is wide. She looks happy. She looks strong.

“With a Woo…kiee,” she says.

“Stupid,” Rose hiccups, laughing through the tears.

“Mmhmm.”

It is just a dream. But maybe it is more than that. Paige feels so real. Like she is truly here with her, like somehow, she is reaching out to her from the beyond, to comfort her, to bolster her, and give her what she needs to keep going. Maybe this is only her hope, her grief, giving her something that life cannot. Maybe not. Maybe it _is_ real.

Whatever the case may be, Rose finds that she is laughing, and Paige is laughing, and in this moment, in this dream, in this ephemeral space between life and death where they are the Tico sisters once more, all is well.

. . .

The fire in the hearth is burning low, little more than embers, by the time Rey has cried herself empty and returned to the sitting room. Where shards of mirror laid earlier, the carpet and mantle are now swept clean; Rose lies sleeping on one of the couches, her soft snuffling breaths even and deep.

Rey couldn’t dream of sleeping.

She stokes the fire and pulls an oversized armchair close, prepared to while away the night staring into the glowing crimson coals.

It is not the usual dread of dreams that keeps her up, but the burning questions that set her thoughts churning.

_Is Ben one with the Force? Or is he gone forever?_

For four years she has lived with this question. When she woke, while she drifted to sleep, as she cleaned her teeth, or took her meals, or bathed; while she flew and fought and spent afternoons restoring old Republic starships—no matter where she was, no matter what she was doing—this question has followed her. Haunted her.

_Where_ are _you?_ she wanders, as she watches a tiny flickering flame flare to life then die upon one of the smoldering logs. 

_Is what we had really all we will ever have? Can the galaxy be so cruel?_

He was there in the lake. That she did not imagine; this much she _knows_.

“Be with me.”

It is hoarse, a whispered incantation, no louder than the fire’s crackling nor the lake’s swishing whisper. A rogue effort, a wild dream. Impossible, no doubt.

But Rey has gone four years without a scrap of hope and she is starving. This crumb is akin to a feast; she cannot help but gorge herself on it.

“Ben!” she grits out, slightly louder, glancing towards Rose, who stirs only enough to roll over, sniffling softly in her sleep before her breathing evens out once more. “Be with me. Please, by the Force, please be with me.”

Nothing. Silence. Silence like before, down by the lake. Silence. Like the sound of Ben’s body fading into the aether. Silence. Like the gaping wound in her chest, a vortex pulling in all sound, all light, all emotion, until there has only been: _act, react, move, go_. Silence. The prevailing sound of the last four years. Silence. The sound of her soul, without its other half.

Silence.

The cruelest sound.

“Please,” she murmurs. The hearth is smeared now, a ruddy blur through her tears. “Be with—” 

And then: a light, a shimmering. A disturbance in the air before her, a parting of molecules. And where there was silence, where there was a void, now there is a shape. There is not sound, per se, but there is the absence of silence, and there is something else:

His shape.

Tall, broad, hale, towering over her armchair. Glowing. Still in that bedraggled tunic, with the hole ripped over the ribs where she, in her unchecked fury, drove her saber clean through him.

His face is pale; it glows like the moons of Naboo. There is no remnant of the scar she gave him, but there is the ghost of a smile playing at his lips. Rey cannot bear to see it, to see such teasing happiness.

With a sob, she averts her gaze from his incandescent form. Down at her utilitarian, regulation leggings and boots. At the carpet where the shards of mirror no longer lay.

Too bright, too much. 

But then: he appears again before her. Silently, he has sunk down to his knees.

Can there be hope?

Rey looks at him.

It’s Ben, as she remembers him, in the last moments of life. But he is not bloodied or bruised; his hair is not wild. He looks rested. Calm. Composed.

“Rey,” he murmurs. Only that. Only her name, and already it is too much.

“I—” she tries, but she is choking on her own tears.

He is here and he is whole and he is glowing white, emanating light; he is not of this world anymore, but neither is he entirely of the next, because he bows forward until his forehead rests upon her thighs. She can feel the weight of it, the warmth.

“Rey.”

“Ben?”

She places a questing hand on the back of his head, then twirls a single dark lock around her pointer finger. It, too, shines bright. But she holds it all the same.

He pushes himself up to meet her gaze. His dark eyes shine in the low firelight. A hand, his hand, rises to cradle her jaw, then her cheek. She can feel the calluses on his fingertips, the warmth of his flesh.

“I’m here with you,” he tells her.

She launches forward, wrapping her arms around his neck, then drags him halfway onto the chair with her, tucking her face into his neck.

He is so solid. Moreso than Luke was on Ahch-To, moreso than the apparition of the Skywalker twins on Tatooine. He smells like earth and air and sky and water but also like man, like warmth, like life.

This is _real_. He may be a ghost, yes, but he is neither dream nor phantom.

“ _Ben_!” she yelps.

He pulls away from her and she nearly cries out at the loss, but then… 

His lips brush hers. Gentle, careful.

“Rey,” he sighs into her mouth, “You’re here. You called for me. Thank you.”

She makes a questioning noise in her throat, but she cannot stop now, cannot stop kissing him, cannot stop crying.

He breaks from her again, but only for a moment, only to say, “I’ve been waiting for you… and you came back.”

There is love in his eyes, pure love, warm love. Rey cannot speak; she cannot do anything but kiss him, and kiss him, and kiss him.


	4. Chapter 4

**35 ABY.**

Ben dies.

He dies as he has died before, for this is not the first time he has died. Sort of.

To become Master of the Knights of Ren, after all, one must undergo the unbearable, the unthinkable. One must perform the Rites of Ren, and in the final rite, one must give their life, then be reborn in darkness. And one must embrace that darkness. One must find their way back to life through the dark mire of the void, and know that it is the Dark side of the Force that yields passage, that reshapes the new Ren into its knight. Its servant.

He was supposed to die as Ben and return as Kylo.

But he was never a proper Master; he was a false knight, a pretender. Because Ben did not die in the rites as he should have. Not fully.

This time when he dies, as with the last, he is returned to the darkness, to the primordial nothing where all creatures lay down their souls to rest—but no quarter of his tortured, ragged soul, neither Ben nor Kylo, can find peace.

Because he is not merely his own, and he hasn’t been since Rey was born. He can pinpoint the day: ten years old, already worrying his parents with the things he could do, the gathering darkness that clouded his mind at times, and one morning, as he played alone with his toys in his bedroom, there was a tug on his soul. Because there was another. Because he was _not_ alone, from that moment on—he was made whole that day, and somewhere out there, a missing part of himself was waiting for Ben to find it. His dyad, his other half.

He did find her. Saved her, even, giving his life for hers. A trade he would make again and again, every time.

That is the one thought sustains him in the darkness, as emptiness and a timeless, ageless nothing grinds away his flesh then gnaws on his bones until it reaches his soul and recoils. This featureless place cannot abide the restlessness of his halved spirit; that is not its purpose.

Thus, he is sent back.

When he has form again, oh, his weak and ignoble flesh—restored to crude matter, luminous being trapped safely inside—he finds he is lying supine on a bridge.

The bridge extends off into space, distant nebulae and birthing galaxies and twinkling stars the only sources of light. It should not be possible, but then, what does he know? He thought he died. He has dreamed of death many times, was it ever like this? He cannot recall. What is dream and what is real? What does it matter, anyway? He has been untethered; all that belonged to the living is behind him now.

Yet he senses that is not entirely true. And this place, too, cannot support his restlessness, his need for his missing half.

“Ben,” calls a voice, a woman’s voice, high and airy and full of strength. He does not know the owner of the voice but inherently, he trusts her. So he rises, barefoot, and tries to follow it to its source. He walks among the stars, on a bridge made of nothing; to his left and right, he passes portals. Through the portals he catches glimpses of many things.

He sees himself dying, twice. Once he is alone, surrounded by his knights; once he is not alone, but in the arms of his love.

He sees himself as a young boy. Laughing, playing, for a time, but then a change comes. Screaming through the nights, eyes rolling behind his eyelids, besieged by menacing voices in his sleep. Growing sullen, withdrawn. Growing tall. Gangly. An overgrown lothpup, all long limbs and a face not yet ready to support its strong features.

He sees himself arrive at Luke’s praxeum, he sees himself training, he sees his fall.

He sees the night Luke sought to strike him down.

He sees the day on Takodana when he _found_ her, at last.

He sees how terribly it all went, all the mistakes he made, a long chain of sins he committed in the years between the two events. He sees himself doing unforgivable things, he sees himself becoming the monster she would claim he was.

He sees other things, too. Things he was either not alive or present for. 

He sees a young slave boy being whisked off of his desert planet, taking one last look back at the mother he will never see alive again. He sees a princess carrying the weight of Naboo on her shoulders; he sees that princess’s daughter, who will do the same for Alderaan. He sees a street-hardened orphan on Corellia deserting from the war, tumbling headlong into a life of petty crime. He sees a moisture farmer’s nephew gazing at a Tatooinian binary sunset, longing for things he doesn’t understand. Not yet. He watches the boy triumph, watches him fail.

Again, through yet more portals, he sees the moisture farmer’s nephew. Now he is longer young nor merely a nephew nor lacking understanding; now he is a weary Jedi Master. Now he is reluctantly teaching a young scavenger. Now he is an apparition standing before a cave and protecting those inside, buying them time.

From _him_. From Kylo.

From Ben.

A monster, screaming and frothing at the mouth, desperate, terrible. All that she'd said he was; all that his parents had feared he'd be; all that he'd always dreaded becoming. Losing every battle, both within and without.

Ben is no longer of the living, and with that comes the privilege of omniscience. The entire tragedy of the Skywalkers is laid before him, as though he were merely a man out for a night at the opera. A grand panoply of suffering played across the galaxy’s stage: this has always been his family’s destiny.

This was always _his_ destiny.

At last, Ben understands.

“Ben!” The woman again, more urgent this time. He comes to a portal that shows a scene he does not recognize, though it reminds him vaguely of the quiet countryside of Chandrila, his homeworld: a serene lake, tall trees swaying in a breeze he cannot feel, and situated on a hill, a great gleaming palace.

“Ben,” begs the voice, from within the portal. “Come, Ben, quickly.”

He steps into that pastoral scene, leaving no trace behind that he ever existed—that he ever walked the path of the world between worlds.

. . .

It is so quiet inside Varykino. Only wild animals and spirits inhabit its echoing halls. Golden pheasants call to one another from their nests in the high-set sconces; the scratching of ollopom claws on marble can be heard as the rodents skitter from room to room, feasting on pillows and carpets and tapestries.

Ben is alone. He wanders.

All he finds is room after room falling into disrepair. They tell a story, though—one he learned in that place with the portals, through glimpses into other times. The story spans several centuries. There is a vein of madness that runs through it like one of Naboo’s crystalline rivers, sparkling and irrepressible. There is love, but it never triumphs. There is deep, unending sadness. 

He cannot tell if that comes from himself or the spirit of his grandmother, who flits around at the corners of his vision, refusing to reveal herself.

“Padmé,” he says, to an empty dining room whose tall windows face out onto Lake Rilindje. “Why have you brought me here?”

She gives no answer.

He has no need for food; when he gathers wild berries from the palace grounds and lifts them to his lips, he cannot bring himself to eat. He does not sleep; when he tries to tuck himself into one of the palace’s many moldering beds, all he sees is Rey’s deadened eyes staring at nothing, and he finds no peace. He is part of the world and also he is not; when he glimpses his reflection in a mirror or down at the water’s edge, he can see that he is healed, he is whole, but he glows a luminescent blue-white, like the moons of Naboo.

“What have you done to me?” he asks the lady of the house.

The only response is silence, the cruelest sound.

. . .

He cannot leave. He discovers this within hours of stepping through the portal. He can go as far as the edge of the property, and no further.

“Rey!” he bellows into the still afternoon, with lungs just as powerful as they were when he was alive. He turns in the direction of Theed. “Rey!”

After he has exhausted himself with his shouting, he tries one final time, in a smaller, doubtful voice: “Rey?”

No response. Only the sighing of the wind, and the lake’s ceaseless lapping upon the sandy shore.

. . .

Time passes slowly. Or does it pass quickly? If he's being honest, without the basic needs of the living to mark its passage, Ben struggles to keep track of it; the days slip through his fingers like drops of water.

The palace, with its shining domed towers and its sweeping balconies and the scent of decay and sadness that haunts each room, holds his interest. For a time. He explores the rooms, each piece of furniture, each locked door and cabinet and drawer. There are clues here and there, old holograms, left behind artifacts of lives lived long before he was born. Doors behind which hide rooms full of secrets. Many things are not what they seem at first glance. He lingers on these.

That’s how he finds the attic.

. . . 

The spindly staircase leading up to it, hidden behind a false wall he's discovered only by chance, only because he felt air blowing through a crack underneath it, is covered in a thick coat of dust. Dangling cobwebs attempt to cling to him as he climbs the steps; with a little effort, he passes through them as though it is he who is the draft, no more than an incandescent shadow.

It’s unsettling how easy that has become.

In the attic, there are locked trunks, old holoprojectors, a few armoires, many armchairs; all is dejected and dusty, strewn about the space. The only source of light is a few skylights in the domed, raftered ceiling. Everything feels forgotten, even moreso than in the rooms down below.

Idly, he picks up one of the projectors and, collapsing into an old chair, begins to flick through its saved hologram messages.

Each was recorded by a young princess-turned-senator pining for her clandestine Jedi knight love. As he watches, her face grows softer, her body fuller, her expression more solemn, more full of yearning.

“Ani,” she says, softly, “Be careful out there. Please, please be careful. I know it’s important, what you’re doing, but I… I worry…”

He flicks it off, unable to watch. Ben knows how that story ends.

“Those were dark days,” says a woman’s voice. The same one that called out to him through space and time, the one that brought him here.

“Padmé,” he breathes.

She is there before him, looking as she did on the day of her funeral, white asphodels tucked in her long chocolate curls, her dress a light, pleated aqua blue under an iridescent dark blue cloak studded with pearls. She appears heavily pregnant with his mother and uncle; she looks like a goddess of water and fertility and life.

Her smile is faint. In a moment of flickering, she becomes something else: an earlier version of herself, a lithe young princess, dressed simply in a white gown. She sits in an armchair opposite his, and a small cloud of dust rises up around her before settling.

“Ben.”

“I failed,” he says.

Padmé tilts her head. “Did you?”

“That’s why I’m here. I’m being punished for my failures.” When Padmé continues to stare at him, he adds, “Aren’t I?”

“Oh, my sweet boy. You are… so much like your grandfather.” Her brow furrows and she reaches out to clasp his hand. “I didn’t bring you here to punish you. And you _didn't_ fail.”

He lets that information roll over him, and all he can muster is: “But I’m trapped.”

“You are safe.”

“Aren’t _you_ trapped?”

“I am…” she hesitates for an instant, then resolve settles over her elfin features, “Also safe. Where I need to be. Or… needed. Before you two eliminated the one who’s been looking for me all this time.”

It only takes half a second to put the pieces together. “Palpatine.”

Padmé nods.

“Is he here?” Ben asks, thoughts drifting towards another dark disciple, “Is Darth Vader?”

“Darth Vader was a ghoul constructed by the emperor,” she spits, “To trap my Anakin in a lifetime of torment. He is no one and he is nowhere.”

Ben swallows; Padmé's anger is a tangible thing, filling the attic room like hot air, pressing in on him. “Then… Anakin…”

“Anakin is here with me. Where he belongs. Now that you have dealt with that… that odious…” Padmé falters again before forcing herself to go on, “When we see you through your ordeal, we will pass into the Force.”

“Do I… belong here?”

She sighs. “Oh, Ben. Kylo was a ghoul, too. Constructed by the emperor, to trap you in a lifetime—”

“It was me,” he interrupts. “I did those things.”

“As Anakin did. But can you believe me when I tell you that you were not alone then and that you are not alone now?”

Ben scoffs. “I felt alone. When I died, both times. Where _were_ you then? Where was Anakin? Or my uncle? Where were the ghosts of the Jedi that came before me?”

Her expression turns sorrowful and her eyes shine with unshed tears. “Things have not been as they should. That’s why I brought you here—to protect you, to let you heal. To fix things, at last.”

“I don’t want to heal! I want Rey!” He rises, his surroundings washed in the red of his rage; in his pique, he overturns a nearby trunk. Senatorial robes tumble out.

“Ben,” she says, “She will come. Can you have faith that she will come? Can you hold on for just a little while?”

He shakes his head. “I could’ve gone to her. If you hadn’t trapped me here, I could be wherever she is right now—”

“You might have. Or you might have trapped yourself somewhere else. I couldn't know for certain. You are no mere ghost in the Force, Ben. Half of your soul is still among the living—you are not free to walk the stars, as others are.”

Understanding dawns on him, slowly, but irreversibly. “Am I dead or aren’t I?”

“I—” Padmé’s mouth hangs open for a moment until she snaps it shut. “I’m not entirely sure.”

Ben sinks back into the chair. He sighs, then runs a hand through his unkempt waves. “So now what?”

His grandmother's spirit levels him with a frank stare. “Now… we wait.”

. . .

The days grow shorter, the nights bitter. The leaves on the trees of the palace grounds turn brilliant shades of magenta and crimson and marigold. Then they fade to brown, dropping en masse onto the dried up grass. Low, heavy clouds gather in the sky for what seems to be months on end. The lake churns. Snow falls one day, then another; snow falls for many days, until Ben, in his corporeal form, can barely walk through it. 

Eventually, the sun returns. The snow melts. A warm zephyr blows in from the east, bringing the scent of new life on its trail. Rain falls at night, light and musical on the metal roofs. Tiny green shoots escape through the softening earth and soft buds dot the spindly branches of the trees. The world erupts into verdancy, day by day, green and blossoms and young creatures everywhere. 

The sun’s rays grow stronger and stronger until the atmosphere turns to dense sludge, hot and stifling, everything weighted down and laconic from the heat. The fish jump lazily from the lake, disrupting its mirrorlike surface to sip at the humid air. Otherwise, nothing moves. 

Then the nights turn sharp once more, and the days grow crisper, shorter. Then cold.

It begins anew.

Ben watches all of it, for there is little else to do. There are many rooms in Varykino; he knows the minute details of each. But he can go no further than the prairies to the north, than the lake to the south, than the falls to the east, than the small forest to the west. He learns these as well, down to each rock and root and ridge. It makes no difference.

Time goes on. One year, two years, three years, nearing four.

And through all that time, for all his restless roaming of the grounds, through all the nights he spends frightening off youths who come to the palace to drink and be amorous, through all his tempestuous days and sullen days and despairing days… Ben waits. Padmé keeps him company sometimes; sometimes they even speak of the past, though it is painful for them both. He does not see his other relatives, although she assures him they are keeping vigil, too. He tries to have faith that _she_ will come. Some days he does. Others, he does not.

Naboo spins round its sun, on and on, always changing. Ben stands utterly still.

* * *

**39 ABY.**

And then, one fine summer day, as though conjured by his most fervent, desperate, prayers, she is there. In the lake. In her skivvies. Wet and alive and splashing, laughing as she trails behind her diminutive, dark-haired friend.

He calls to her. “Rey!”

Once ashore, she casts her gaze over the grounds, the palace, the lake: assessing, appraising. 

“Rey! Over here!”

Nothing. Rey’s face has barely changed since he last saw her, and he can see in its blank expression that his voice has gone unregistered. She raises her hand to shade her face from the brilliant sun overhead, then turns to say something to her friend.

“She can’t hear me.”

“I don’t understand,” says Padmé, from behind him. She appears shaken, her face pale, as she steps forward to stand at his side. “Why can’t she hear you?”

Bereft, Ben shakes his head.

But if he cannot reach her through ordinary means, he decides, as he follows her from room to room of the old palace, then he will have to get creative.

He has waited too long to gone unheard.

That night, while she and her friend—Rose, he has learned, through the course of their conversations—set up their durashelters on the third floor's southern balcony, Ben sits cross-legged on the balustrade nearby, watching over them. Keeping his own vigil.

As they sleep, he forms a plan.


	5. Chapter 5

His plan has worked.

She has summoned him from the hinterlands. And now he can taste the salt of her tears on his tongue, feel the furious thrumming of her jugular under his fingertips. Now he is holding her in his arms, and for the first time in—stars, has it really been four years? It feels like it’s been an eternity and also a mere heartbeat since he held her last—For the first time in four years, he feels like himself. Across the room, on the sofa, Rose sleeps on, snuffling, unknowing. Better that way, he thinks. In her dreams, she is finding an answer she desperately needs. Ben looks down at Rey. Here in the waking world, she and him are finding their own answer.

They are two that are one.

This is how it should have been. Or rather… this is close enough to how it should have been.

He can touch her.

He can taste her.

He can do a lot of things.

Ben meets Rey’s searching gaze. She looks like she wants to ask him a question, but she needn’t ever ask.

The answer has always been yes, will always be yes.

. . .

Whose bed they tumble into, Rey does not know. Nor does she does care.

It’s a bed. It’s clean enough. It does not smell of animal droppings or mildew. It has soft cotton sheets that have not been gnawed through by rodents or moths. When Ben drops her onto it then crawls after her, settling himself between her thighs, the weight of his body atop hers is everything, as is the give of the mattress beneath her.

It shouldn’t be possible.

When his hands—warm, like a living man’s, and again there is the question of what he _is_ now, but this is not the time for contemplation of metaphysics—when they sneak under her shirt, thumbs brushing over each rib, Rey pays no more mind to questions of beds or body warmth or anything else that is not the toe-curling pleasure of having him here with her, touching her, lips pressed against a tender bit of flesh under her jaw.

“Ben,” she croons, twining her legs around the back of his thighs to keep him right where she wants him.

“I’m here.”

“Closer.”

“Mm,” he hums, and complies, big hands easily palming her breasts. 

He is shaking by the time he has divested her of her clothes, and so is she. They tremble together, wrapped up in the linens, limbs entwined, as he rocks against her, and finds her slick and warm and needful of him. When he prods her entrance, she gasps into his mouth, and greedily he swallows the breath, groaning.

“Can—”

“Do it,” she keens.

“But have you—should I—”

“ _Do it_.”

And when he does, he has never been realer, never been more alive, even if his long, heavy limbs glow moon-white in the dim room, even if Rey watched him fade into nothing four years ago and a half a galaxy away, now he is here and he is solid flesh and he is inside her. There is a sharp pinch, there is a burn, and he waits, pressing soft kisses to her damp cheeks, his own tears anointing her in return, until she rolls her hips experimentally, eliciting a gasp of his own.

The pinch and the burn fade away, and there is just warmth, and the sound of wet, swollen flesh, and the feeling of being full and safe and held. Cherished. So close that not even the Force could pass between them, like they are knit together. No longer two, no longer separate.

He rocks against her. She rocks back.

Like the waves of a storm-swept lake, they move. And just like those waves, they rise up, up, up, until they crest, and break. As one.

. . .

“How is it possible that we could do—that?” she asks, after, lying limp atop him, breathless and sweaty and sated.

Rey has rested her head upon his wide chest; inside, his heartbeat has not yet quieted. That should not be possible. She feels him twitch one shoulder in a careless shrug.

She pushes herself up to peer into his dark eyes. He says nothing, but one hand rises from the damp sheets to stroke a soothing pattern up and down her back. 

“I don’t understand this.”

“Me neither,” he says guilelessly. His expression is so open, so earnest.

“Have you—” she tries, but her voice breaks, and she must clear her throat before continuing, “All this time, you were here?”

“Waiting.” There is a hard edge to his voice, but his mouth is soft, eyes shining.

“For me.”

“I think so.”

“I’m sorr—”

“No,” he interrupts. “Don’t, Rey. Please. How could you have known? Just… tell me about where you’ve been. Tell me what you’ve seen. Tell me… everything.”

His hand continues stroking that unknowable pattern. Rey feels her eyelids grow heavy, long yearned-for contentment a sedative that is lulling her to sleep. “I missed you. So much.”

“And I you.”

“Sometimes I think I barely knew you—we’ve barely spoke, before… well. Before Exegol. A handful of times. And yet I felt…”

“Yes.” He nods down at her. “I know.”

“Can we sleep? And talk later? You’ll stay, won’t you?” she murmurs.

Ben offers her a smile, for the second time in her life. It is a beautiful sight, his eyes crinkling, a deep dimple forming in his cheek. “Of course. Sleep, Rey. I’ll be here when you wake.”

That is all she needs for now. Her eyes sink closed. She dreams of nothing, rousing every so often, only long enough to know that he is still holding her close, his body wide and firm and yet pliant against her own, before she returns to the dark warmth of her dreamless slumber.

. . .

Ben does not know exactly how he learned to rid Rey of her dreams, only that he found himself able to do it, and did not hesitate once he realized he could.

That first night she arrived, he saw the spectre of death looming low over her like an ominous storm cloud, dark and menacing. So he laid his hand on her brow until the cloud had dissipated, and stayed there throughout the night, watching to ensure it did not return.

He does that again now as he holds her. She is lithe but strong. Warm, warm everywhere, a warmth he has partaken of, and of which he thinks he might become an addict.

Beautiful.

The most beautiful thing he has ever seen.

If there is anger simmering under the surface of his thoughts—because he did not get to have this when he was flesh and blood, because he does not understand why she has lived such a spartan life since he passed into the Force, because it took so long for the Force to reunite them, and they have both hurt so deeply in the interim, because it seems to the chance for them to have _this_ , to have a life together, has passed them by—he does not turn his mind directly to it.

He lets it lie where it is, under the surface.

Now is not the time; these wan hours of the night are for protecting her from bad dreams. This is his sole mission, and he dedicates himself to it.

The rest can wait.

. . .

When she stirs in the early hours of the morning, the sun not yet risen, held tight in his arms, her sharp chin pressed into the flesh of his pectoral, she offers him a tiny sleepy smile, and he thinks:  _ Every terrible thing that has ever been done to me, that I have ever done, has been worth it. _

“Did you sleep well?”

“Mm,” she hums in the affirmative, rubbing her cheek against his chest.

“At night,” he says, “you’ve dreamt of terrible things. No more ocean.”

That gets her attention. The last vestiges of sleep fall away as her eyes widen. “No… no more ocean,” she agrees.

Ben keeps his voice soft. Cautiously, he tells her, “I took them from you. When you arrived, I felt your pain as you slept. I couldn’t bear it.”

“Did you…” she swallows the words, then rallies. “Do you dream them now, instead of me? That you died?”

“I did die, Rey.”

“But do you dream?”

Does he? He no longer sleeps. But is there still some part of him that dreams? He thinks there might be. He thinks as long as there has been a Ben Solo, even when he refused and rejected his own self, there have been his dreams.

There was never any escaping them.

But he demurs. “I think the part that was a dream has passed for me.” He reaches up to cup her cheek in his palm. The next words will be painful to say, but then, there are many painful things that must be said, so he gets on with it. “Too quickly.”

“For me too. Minutes,” she croaks, blinking in an effort to fight the tears that are welling, “We had minutes, Ben. It isn’t—”

“Fair?” He feels one side of his mouth lift in a sardonic grin.

Rey pouts at him. “Well, it’s not.”

He nods his agreement, thumb stroking her delicate cheekbone. Her skin is so soft, so warm. He can just make out the freckles in the faint light that he realizes, belatedly, bemusedly, is coming from himself.

Luminous being is he, after all.

“No, it isn’t,” he says at last.

“We will have the time we are owed,” she resolves, staring up into his eyes.

It isn’t fair to ask that of her. Even Kylo Ren, or Ben Solo, or whoever he is now and whoever he had been for all those wasted years of his life, in all his selfishness and wrath and ruinous appetite, knows that much. It is unfair to ask this living woman whom he adores to live in a crumbling house of ghosts, with a half-living lover. But Rey’s mouth has settled into a firm line, twitching at the edges into an affectionate smirk, and Ben finds he has been robbed of all semblance of thought.

Not a single word of protest passes his lips.

Instead, he simply nods.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello I know it has been a hot minute since I posted last and to be honest, I am not even convinced that this chapter is anything but a big old mess but I have not been able to write a single word in weeks and then this morning I finally, finally, _finally_ felt inspired to put words on the page so I am just trying to keep this momentum going. I needed to write something soft between these two. Hope you all are doing well and finding ways to keep happy and hopeful. 💕


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